TRAVEL
Art After Stonewall A painstakingly comprehensive Ohio exhibition reveals how the birth of the Pride movement changed art forever By Doug Wallace All images coutesy of the Columbus Museum of Art
Keith Haring, “Safe Sex”
JULY / AUGUST 2020
“It’s the new San Francisco!” That’s what I keep telling people who ask why I’m going to Columbus, Ohio, in the middle of March. I pull this out of thin air, but everyone seems to buy it.
Art. His idea was championed by the CMA, and a team of CMA curators – including Tyler Cann and Drew Sawyer – began working on the show several years ago. They were surprised to find that in the lead-up to the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, there was no major celebratory art exhibition planned for the summer of 2019. So the Columbus project became “it.”
Really, I’m going to see Art After Stonewall, 1969-1989 at the Columbus Museum of Art (CMA), a collection of more than 200 works by queer artists and their allies from 1969 to 1989. Helping to mark the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, the show “We assumed there’d be a glut of shows, and that it was going to be explores the impact of the LGBTQ civil rights movement on the difficult to get loans for our show, a historical-based exhibition,” art world, demonstrating how artists, avant-gardists, political says art historian and co-curator Daniel Marcus. “Then at one point, activists and general social change brought forth a new reflection Jonathan realized that there just wasn’t another museum doing what of emerging queer subcultures. The exhibition had to close for a we were doing, so there wouldn’t be any conflict of loan. That’s few months during the pandemic outbreak, but is expected to be when we decided to open in New York in 2019.” back up and running until some time in the early autumn, with a small but interesting encapsulation available at ColumbusMuseum. And the crowd went wild To say the exhibition was a hit is an understatement. Ditto the org/Stonewall. reviews in Miami, the show’s autumn stop on the road before it The fact that Art News magazine called it “one of the most important moved into two floors of the CMA this past March. It covers a exhibitions of the decade” is enough to sell me on this straight huge swath of photography, painting, sculpture and music, as well away. But the big question on my mind is: Why Columbus? Why as conceptual, performance, film and video art. not New York? Included are era-defining photographs from JEB (Joan E. Biren), Art After Stonewall is the brainchild of Jonathan Weinberg, an Shelley Seccombe, Diana Davies, Sunil Gupta, Tseng Kwong artist, art historian and critic who teaches at the Yale School of Chi and Crawford Barton, along with seminal canvases from the 54
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